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Monthly Archives: June 2017

Tragedy, humanity & the power of together.

16 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Belonging, certainty, Climate Change, Cocaine, Collective Action, Decency, faith, Frodo, Grenfell Tower, Hubris, Humanity, Humility, Industrial lager, Instagram, Kardashian, London Bridge, Manchester, Mortgages, Paris, Personal Debt, Politicians, smart phones, Social Responsibility, Together, Tolkien

27-storey-grenfell-tower-engulfed-fire-west-london.jpg

One could wonder sometimes where the nobility and civilisation went – given half an eye on our glorious species (though many question whether it was ever there).

Far from the heroic ideal of small people saving the world – of Tolkien’s Hobbiton and Frodo’s sacrifice – we’re all a little disappointing down the small people end of the telescope.

We’re all lascivious, low and feral and we’re all off to whichever hell is trending currently.

Left to our own devices all we do is sprawl, brawl, rut, piss, shit, heave and fuck like the beasties we are, on the streets, station concourses, on buses, on planes, alleys: in doorways and up against walls, wrapped up in cheap-as-chips slave wear bought in multipacks of 5. Nascent young Motherhood lies collapsed like a sack of charity shop clothing on a pavement, steeped in their own sick. Nascent young fatherhood stamps on heads till they pop on an empty shopping precinct floor, sweating industrial lager and cheap cocaine.

We use £500 state of the art smart phones to film everything from our genitals and instagrammed inanities to humiliations, threats, gang rapes, beatings and murder.

We use state of the art, government-toppling social networks to circulate a ‘shag on a plane’ film to anyone bored enough to care or the next cat film to those who don’t.

We live lives way beyond our means. We inhabit houses and drive cars we can’t afford. We bullshit ourselves into believing that the debt we carry is a right of entitlement – part of the glory of being human, here and alive.

We convince ourselves that communities don’t really need our help, there is no society other than our own; that ‘doing a Kardashian’ is desirable, that knife crime and landfill will miraculously resolve themselves, that climate is an inconvenience, and of course, the real biggie, that we need 5 holidays per annum. Which is why we need 5 credit cards.

Bu But BUT

Look at us when the sky comes down and the thunder rolls. Look at us as we respond to the percussive blows and crises that envelop us.

Look at how we have responded. In Manchester. In London. And now to the Grenfell tower disaster. And not just to our own. Paris. Another coming together. Another standing side by side. Across generations, cultures, tribes, classes, regions, borders.

Suddenly, it is as if we see each other again. Beyond gender, race, religion or persuasion.

See each other and remember – we are just people amongst people like us. We remember who we are, what we are capable of. What our co-existence demands of us all. And rise to it.

And we remember that deserving is not about cars and phones and watches and holidays. It’s about people deserving a sense of belonging, to not be left behind or marginalised: a decent quality of life, affordable and accessible care, social support. And that as people we deserve politicians and the public and private sector to be responsible to us not the spreadsheet or the Poll – responsible for our social well being, not our financial success.

We remember that life is OK. And could be far, far worse.

And that there by whichever god, mantra, metric or quantum equation go us.

We realise that the precious things are the living breathing things connected to us by genes, community, friendship, accident or serendipity. And everything else is just tat and jewellery. And party small talk.

We realise that the most precious things are the living things like us. And that we should wish for them what we wish for ourselves. A safe, secure and supported life, everyone looking out for each other. A sense of belonging the right of every human being.

Suddenly we see that people are looking to each other. Helping others. Keeping an eye out.

Perhaps, for just a moment, we prove yet again that when push comes to shove we can rise up out of the self-obsessed pit we all live in.

For a moment we remember that, in the middle of all of this uncertainty, the only thing we can be certain of is ourselves – our actions, our beliefs and our values. What we give a shit about and what we’ll do and what we’ll put on the line to hold up those values and beliefs. When collective humanity and humility transcend individual identity and hubris.

Perhaps it does take the madness for us to remember what we seemed once far more  certain of – our best selves both individually and collectively – and when to apply them in the world we live in.

Here’s to that.

Movie houses, memories & the illumination of negative city spaces.

15 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Absence, Art School, buildings, Culture, Fleshy Data, London Underground, Look Up, Marble Arch, memory, No.73 Bus, Observation, Overground, redevelopment, urban regeneratio, urban Sprawl, youth

Screen Shot 2017-06-15 at 10.14.50.png

There’s something quite remarkable about street level living.

And when I say street level living, I don’t mean the standard fare we trot out when we talk street life – about street food, pavement culture, busked music, tagging, midnight city walks, clubbing and vibrant multiculturalism. The stirred, slash cut, jagged, muscular, rippling, colourful, odorous, fusty, littered – the fierce and the free.

Nor do I refer to its profoundly saddening counter-culture cousin of the bleak stained streets, the shadows of humanity; the homeless and the abused propped in its doorways. The runaways, drop outs, drug addicts, alcoholics, despondent, broken, fragile – the lonely and the lost

When I say street living I’m talking about the act of living in a city at street level – the relentless act of passing through the urban space – connected to its ordinary everyday – neither floating above it nor tunnelling beneath it.

I am talking about pavement and tarmac bashing – traversing a city using feet and buses, as opposed to dropping into the dusty air-blown human vat of the Underground, its elevated un-tunnelled cousin the Overground, or any of the arterial rail lines coming in and out of the city for that matter, shifting people like emotional clusters of fleshy data from one side to the other.

Trammelling the streets is a goldmine of experience because the rewards are plenty – gifts, revelations, illuminations and surprises at every turn.

If only we remember to look up and look around more often, ‘there’s gold in them thar hills’. 

One surfaced in my journey on Monday morning.

And it smacked of an art school exercise long forgotten and suddenly remembered.

As the 73 bus scarped the edges of Marble Arch the most striking thing was not what had appeared – like the arrival of the inverted horse’s head or the jelly bean people sculptures.

Beautiful and enriching though their appearance was, this morning’s revelation was inspired by quite the opposite – by what had in fact disappeared.

The old Odeon, perched on the edge of Marble Arch and Edgware Road for as long as I can remember, was gone. In its place a large space revealing the buildings behind it and to the side of it. A 90 degree, dog-legged breather amongst the claustrophobic clutter of city buildings.

The building that was, was not only enshrined in my material view of the city I traverse – its geo-located bulk a firm, fixed point in my universe.  It was also located on both my emotional and temporal maps of the city.

The Odeon Marble Arch played high stakes in my youthful rummaging around London – the western edge of the West End. The corn-franked, pop-furtered fust of its dark interior home to many happy and boisterous outings. Heady times indeed.

So, to me, its absence was truly remarkable. An experience that was both a mournful missing and an urban eye bath in one. Truly bitter-sweet.

And it struck me that our enjoyment and the relentless revelations of the cities we inhabit are as much driven by the things time takes away – and the negative spaces that their departure leaves behind – as they are by the staggering multiplicity of new developments,  redevelopments, re-generations and resurgences of neighbourhoods, communities, boroughs, villages, estates, high streets and thoroughfares.

And it was the relationship between what is, what was and what might be that intrigued me. The tension between them.

So to the art project.

When doing basic foundation art, in still life and spatial studies, one of the first things you are taught is not only to draw the things you see in front of you in your still life – the positive – but also to render the spaces between those objects – the negatives. You are given the task of turning the negative space into a ‘thing’. To make the unseen seen. And to explore the relationship between the negative and positive. To make them both an equal part of the structural symmetry. And understand the role of both in creating Tension in the composition of things.

Simply put, this is about looking through, looking beyond – about truly ‘seeing’ – beyond the obvious

So its worth remembering that our seeing is only complete when we’ve engaged our ability to see what isn’t in the cities we live in, as well as what is.

And that we are as invigorated by the absence or removal of things as we are by the presence or addition.

The value of this level of seeing and awareness?

Hopefully it raises questions in us: questions of What if…? What was….? When did I…? Why there…? We question the way we and the spaces we exist in connect, how we attach to each other – materially, spiritually, emotionally.

Looking in this way, seeing the dynamic multi-dimensional relationship and nature of how things co-exist, not just as physical things but across time and cultures and generations reasserts our connection to the world and each other.

This kind of seeing brings the quanta level vibration of life writ large in our world. Each disappearance and appearance a vibration in the world.

Watched through the lens of time lapse – through a fluid eye – the cities would start to resemble a graphic equaliser of our existence and the utility and function of the buildings within it.

And I sense it would be beautiful.

So, to see or not to see. That is the question. And in the No. 73, for me that morning, lay an answer.

‘ got to love a bus.

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